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Posted by Curtis on 12/19/05 03:01
Steve <j80k-vpfc@dea.spamcon.org> wrote in message
news:memo.20051218103006.124C@rook.127.0.0.1...
> In article <do05co02qv6@news2.newsguy.com>,
nospam@nohow.not (Curtis)
> wrote:
>
> > *Subject:* Anything faster than this come to mind?
> > *From:* "Curtis" <nospam@nohow.not>
> > *Date:* Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:49:29 -0800
> >
> > We're writing a markup language, which naturally entails
a
> > lot of text substitution. We use / to do italics, for
> > example, /like so./ The basics are not unlike Textile.
....
> > Unless someone has a better suggestion, we were thinking
of
> > simply pulling all the text out of the brackets and
placing
> > it in an array, processing the paragraphs without the
link
> > text, the links in the array to the appropriate HTML,
then
> > replacing each [[]] sequentially with a HTMLified array
> > item.
> /Italics/ or _underline_ or *bold* in a mail
client/newsreader, work in
> pairs when surrounded by spaces. Since a '/' in a URL is
not part of a
> pair surrounded by space it shouldn't get parsed that way.
>
>
> - Steve
That's a thought, of course, making the white space
significant. Ignoring them would be fastest of all.
We opted against it, because it's one fewer rule for users
to remember. There are occasions where people bury slashes
in words, to indicate alternatives, this/that style. Too,
someone may well write 10%. (Which would bury the percent
sign in text, just as it would appear in a URL.)
Our current syntax uses some single characters as hotkeys,
like *bold*, and to write a real asterisk the user type it
twice, as **. This is far better, in my view, than requiring
an escape key like \*.
Perhaps as good would be a syntax that makes a double
character **bold** and a single one * type normally. We
haven't ruled that out--it's a close call, but in the
prototype we're going with single characters as hotkeys for
uniformity--a single * at the left margin produces a list
item, for example. The source text looks pretty cluttered
with double characters, the theory being that people will
bold words more often than they will use asterisks. (Our
editor thinks so too.)
We finished the link syntax [[...]] in the way I outlined
above, and it seems to work very well. Thanks for your
comments.
--
Curtis
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